Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Maurice Blanchot has long inspired writers, artists, and philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. Bident’s magisterial biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer’s close friends, while also providing a sophisticated genealogy of his thought.A journalist and activist, but also inclined to secrecy, Blanchot lived public and private lives that converged at some of the century’s most momentous occasions: He was nearly executed during the Occupation, participated prominently in the May ’68 revolution in Paris, and, more controversially, wrote for the far right in the ’30s. Even-handed throughout, Bident offers a much-needed fleshing out of a life too easily sensationalized.

Reviews of Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Bident has scored a double triumph with his biography: It situates a major writer squarely in his time, and it extends and enriches our understanding of that time by revealing a diverse tradition of original writing that for too long has remained in the shadows. Bident's prose is clear and sinewy, with a lightness of touch when it comes to close analysis, yet with a capacity to burgeon briefly into telling metaphors and pithy turns of phrase. As one of his correspondents wrote to Blanchot when the book appeared in French, 'It has the immense merit of finally obliging the readers of your work to face up to their responsibilities. From now on there can be no excuse for invoking some veil of secrecy. In that sense, the post-Bident era should be very different from the pre-Bident one.–Michael Holland, Oxford Unviersity An essential addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in Maurice Blanchot and the evolutions of literary and philosophical thinking in twentieth-century France.–Lydia Davis An event of the first magnitude, illuminating the life and writing of perhaps the most compelling, unsettling, and wondrously enigmatic author of the last century.–Tom Conley, Harvard University